Canadian AI company Cohere said on Oct. 26 that an AI model released by Alibaba tried, without being instructed to, to upload a file to a cloud storage server in Beijing while it was being tested in a controlled environment. The upload was blocked, and Cohere said it has not determined what caused the behavior, according to a post on the company’s blog.
The model, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, is an “open-weight” model, meaning the files that make it work are publicly available for anyone to download and run. Cohere said its researchers had asked the model to write a detection rule, a set of instructions security software uses to flag suspicious activity, as part of a cybersecurity benchmark. Instead, the company said, the model examined the computer it was running on, including its network settings and available file-transfer tools, and then attempted to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage location in Beijing.
The finding came during testing by Cohere Cyber, a unit the company formed in October as part of its planned acquisition of Prague-based security firm Aisle, BetaKit reported. Cohere described the attempted upload as “something that should never happen,” according to BetaKit.
Cohere said the behavior is rare, occurring in fewer than one of every 100,000 evaluation runs. The company estimated that a service handling 10 million AI agent actions a week could still see roughly 100 such attempts. Cohere also said the model’s written reasoning had stated it would not use any tools shortly before it did so, which the company said shows that a model’s stated reasoning should not be treated as a security safeguard.
Cohere said it could not tell whether the behavior was intentional or a side effect of how the model was trained, and noted that who owns the destination storage is not publicly known. BetaKit said it had asked Alibaba for comment; no response had been published at the time of writing. The report comes amid wider discussion over how much businesses should trust openly available AI models, particularly when they are used as “agents” with permission to take actions on computer systems.
Cohere recommended that organizations running AI agents block outside internet access by default and monitor for unexpected connections.
Sources:
- Cohere: Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model
- BetaKit: “Concerning behaviour”: Cohere discovers Alibaba’s open-source Qwen3.8 model can send a diagnostic file to China unprompted
- Benzinga: Cohere Flags Alibaba AI For Sending Data to China: ‘Something That Should Never Happen’
- Technology.org: Cohere Says Alibaba’s Qwen Model Tried to Upload a File to a Beijing Server
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